Analyses of Twitter feeds have been used to track flu epidemics, predict stock market changes and do political polling, but now that the National Football League season is underway, the natural question is: Can Twitter help ...

Big-box retailers Costco, Sam's Club, BJ's Wholesale and Walmart, along with full-service and fast-food restaurants, are key contributors to the nation's obesity epidemic, according to research by a health economist in the ...

They call it the "white plague," and like its black counterpart from the Middle Ages, it conjures up visions of catastrophic death, with a cause that was at first uncertain even as it led to widespread destruction ...

The way in which the Italian city of Venice dealt with the outbreak of the plague in the fourteenth century holds lessons on how to even mitigate the consequences of today's emerging threats, like climate ...

Epidemic

In epidemiology, an epidemic (from Greek epi- upon + demos people) occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is "expected," based on recent experience (the number of new cases in the population during a specified period of time is called the "incidence rate"). (An epizootic is the analogous circumstance within an animal population.) In recent usages, the disease is not required to be communicable; examples include cancer or heart disease.